Frédéric Le Moigne

OS Ocean Sciences

The 2020 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Frédéric Le Moigne for outstanding research in ocean biogeochemistry, particularly the vertical exchanges of organic carbon between the surface and the ocean’s interior: the biological carbon pump.

The Ocean Sciences Division is pleased to present the Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award for 2020 to Frédéric Le Moigne, who has demonstrated outstanding achievements throughout his young career. Le Moigne’s research has focussed on open-ocean biogeochemistry, particularly what is known as the biological carbon pump. He has investigated vertical exchanges of organic carbon between the ocean surface and the ocean interior. Le Moigne’s work has revealed the importance of ecosystem structure in producing and consuming marine snow on local and global scales. These outstanding results have been presented in many excellent scientific publications.

Le Moigne is already an experienced and enthusiastic seagoing oceanographer who has undertaken 15 long research voyages totalling 55 weeks at sea. He uses freely drifting particle traps to investigate the fluxes of particles in the ocean from the productive near-surface regions into the ocean depths. His career has spanned various European institutions, and he is now a CNRS scientist at the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography in Marseille.